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Explanation of Open Access Acquisitions Models

Presented by the E-Content Team, Orbis Cascade Alliance

May 2021

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OA Definition

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers.^[1] With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.^[1]

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Model Definitions

Article Processing Charges (APC)/Book Processing Charges: Costs associated with making articles and books openly available.

Green Open Access: author owned version of research articles or book manuscripts that may or may not be deposited into institutional repositories and which do not carry the formatting or copy editing from a commercial scholarly publisher.

Gold Open Access: articles and books/book chapters where article/book processing charges have been paid to make the work freely available to read. These can appear in full open access publications like PLOS One or in hybrid publications that are primarily supported by subscriptions.

Diamond/Platinum Open Access: journals and books where the cost for publishing open access is paid either via a membership, underwritten by an organization, or published readily by an institution and there are no costs to authors to publish and no costs to readers to access the content available

Perpetual Access: The right to retain content subscribed to on a legacy publisher platform.

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Model Definitions

Read and Publish/Publish and Read Deals: journal subscription package agreements where the majority of content is made readily available to subscribers with an annual or multi-year subscription cost, lowered inflation rates or zero inflation rates, and the ability for local faculty at the subscribing institution can publish without payment of APCs or at a lower cost of APC. In addition, the library may forfeit perpetual access rights to all or some titles in the package.

Subscribe to Open Deals (S2O): journal or journal subscription agreements where additional costs are paid in addition to annual subscriptions to allow for the publisher/society to make access to the content openly available and to provide all authors the ability to publish without paying APCs regardless of whether their local institution participates in the cost sharing.

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Orbis Cascade Alliance OA Acquisitions Models

Type	Self Publishing	Preprint	Pure Gold APC	Diamond APC/Subscribe to Open	Hybrid Gold APC/Read & Publish	Green (Self Archiving)
Article level	green equivalent	green equivalent	gold	gold	gold	green
Journal level	N/A	N/A	gold	gold	hybrid	N/A
Who?	author/institution	author	publication	publication	publication	author/library
Where?	website (author/ institution)	preprint archives	~5,000 APC based OA journals	~11,000 Diamond based OA journals	Most legacy subscription journals	institutional repositories
When?	at any stage	before/around submission to journal	simultaneous w/ publication	simultaneous w/ publication	simultaneous w/ publication	0n acceptance/ embargoed
Cost for Author?	hosting fees/platform costs	time to upload	up to $5,500/ article	time to submit	up to $11,000	time to submit
Cost for Library/Alliance?	Hosting fees/platform costs	library support of archive platform thru membership	library support thru memberships/APC funds	library support thru membership/ subscriptions	Sometimes funder/ sometimes in big deals/may give up PA	repository platform & staff costs
License/ copyright?	any, retained by author	choose creative commons/author retains rights	choose creative commons/often author retains rights	choose creative commons/often author retains rights	often CC in exclusive license for publisher	publisher determined license or library license
Fulfills Funder Requirement?	unlikely	unlikely	always	always	always but changing with Plan S	often but not if embargoed

Created by Jeroen Bosman & Bianca Kramer, last modified 20210504